Fenna kept the last bakery on the Ridgeline, and she kept it by hand. Not the last bakery on Maund — there were four others in town, all tended, all loved — but the last one where nothing in the process was automated, where the ovens were stone and the starter was older than she was and the loaves came out of it uneven, and the unevenness was what people came for. The towers east of town could grow a million loaves in a day. People walked up the Ridgeline anyway, in the rain, for a bread that had been waited on.
She was feeding the starter when the storm arrived, late afternoon gone the color of slate. Rain on Maund came off the mountains in long gray sheets, and she had the shutters half down and the ovens warm and nowhere to be, so she stood in the doorway with her arms folded on the flour-sacked tops of her forearms and watched it come in over the valley. Dough was patience, her mother had said once, in the way of saying it to a child: you cannot hurry a living thing, it is ready when it is ready. She had built a whole life on that sentence without meaning to.
Jorn came up through the rain with his collar up and a jar in his hand.
He kept hives up the valley, on the terraces where the old orchards had gone half-wild, and he had been coming down on Fridays for a month now, ostensibly because she liked the honey and he liked the bread. Both of those were true. Also true: she had spent four Fridays being aware of exactly where in the shop he was standing, and aware of herself being aware, and she had not done anything about it, because the thing about patience was that you were supposed to be able to tell when it ran out.
He set the jar on the bench by the door and pushed the wet hair off his forehead with one hand. “It’s going to be a long one,” he said, meaning the storm, and rain ran off the shoulders of his coat and pooled at his boots.
“It’s already a long one,” she said.
“I mean for me. The path up is going to wash out tonight.” He looked at her the whole time he said it, which she let him do, which was itself an answer, though she hadn’t decided yet what the question was.
She turned the jar in her hands. The honey in it was dark, almost red, from the wildflower terraces. “Then you can’t go home,” she said.
“No,” he said.
“I have bread to move before the storm puts the power out, and you’re standing in my doorway dripping.”
“I am,” he said, and kept standing there, and the water ran off him, and neither of them moved for a moment, and then they both laughed at the same time, and that was the question answered.
She put the kettle on, and cut the heel off a loaf that had come out that morning — dark, round, split where it wanted to split — and spread it with the honey from the jar while he sat on the stool by the ovens with his coat steaming dry. He ate the way he did everything, which was slowly and with his whole attention, and she watched his jaw and thought about how long she had been watching his jaw.
“Good?” she said.
“You know it’s good,” he said. “You don’t need me to tell you.”
“No,” she said. “But I like when you do.”
He looked up at her then, across the warm stone room with the storm loud on the roof, and something in the way he looked made her aware of her own breathing, its length and shallowness. She went back around the bench for the butter dish. He caught her hand as she passed, and she let it be caught.
Her hand was floured to the wrist. He turned it over, slowly, like it was a thing worth reading, and looked at the palm, the lines of it traced white, and then he kissed the inside of her wrist, where the skin is thin and the flour hadn’t reached, and she felt it go through her like the first swallow of something hot.
“Stay,” she said. “I’m going to close the shutters first.”
“All right,” he said, which was the kind of answer that agreed to everything.
She closed the shutters with the rain loud behind them and the ovens ticking as they cooled, and when she turned around he was already standing, and she crossed half the room and he crossed the rest, and the kiss began carefully, the way two people kiss when they have each been thinking about it for a month and are trying not to show it, and then stopped being careful. His hands went into her hair and undid what she had done with it that morning. Her hands found the wet fabric of his shirt at the small of his back and held on.
He smelled like rain and wool and woodsmoke, and under all of it, warm, the sour-sweetness of her own shop, and she thought dimly that he had been carrying that home with him every Friday for a month. His mouth moved to her jaw, her ear, the side of her neck where the flour had settled in the fine down, and she heard herself make a sound that would have embarrassed her in daylight, and didn’t, there.
“There’s flour in your hair,” he said against her throat.
“There’s flour everywhere,” she said. “It’s a bakery.”
She took his hand and led him up the narrow stair to the room above, where her bed was under the round window and the storm came silver-green through the glass, and she lit no lamps because the rain-light was gentler than any lamp, and she was already feeling gentler than she had been all day.
She undid his buttons one at a time, which took a while, because he kept stopping her — her collar, her laces, the hem of her shirt coming up over her head with a small puff of flour that made them both laugh into each other’s mouths.
She had thought about his hands. He worked with them, kept them, the way she kept her starter, and they were broad and rough and certain, and they were on her back, her ribs, the weight of one breast, unhurried, like he was learning a recipe he intended to keep. She sat on the bed to pull him down with her and felt the room tilt and settle, felt herself settle with it, warm all the way down, the way the ovens hold their heat through the night after the fire goes out.
“Tell me if I rush you,” he said.
“You’re not rushing me,” she said. “You’ve never rushed me once. It’s infuriating.”
He laughed low against her collarbone and she felt it in her sternum, and after that there was less talking. His mouth went where his hands had been and lower, and she lay with one hand in his hair and her own breath shortening, and the rain was steady on the glass, and she let go of the last habit of the day, which was keeping track of anything at all.
When he came up over her and into her, they both went still for the length of one breath, his name in her mouth and hers in his, and then it was slow, slower than the storm, and deep the way warmth is deep, and she rose to it, her hands on his back, his face in her neck, the whole bed gathering around them like rising dough — and she abandoned the thought before it finished, because this was not a thing to be made clever, it was a thing to be had, and she had it, longer, then longer still, until it broke over her in long warm pulses and she said his name and other things without arranging them, and felt him follow her over with a shudder that she held against her whole body, her arms around his back, her face in his shoulder, holding.
After, the rain kept on.
They lay in the rain-light with the blanket half over them and his arm under her head, and the storm settled from hammering to steady, and neither of them said anything for a while, because nothing needed saying and neither of them was the sort to fill a silence to make it less like itself.
Then she said, “You did that on purpose.”
“Did what.”
“The honey. Friday is the only day you come down, and you knew the path would wash out, it always washes out in the first big one of the season, and you came down anyway.” She propped herself on his chest. “You brought an excuse in a jar.”
“I brought honey,” he said. “The excuse was the rain’s.”
She laughed until she had to put her face against his shoulder to stop, and his hand moved slowly up and down her back, unhurried, and below them the ovens ticked as they cooled, and the starter sat covered in its crock, rising in the dark, ready when it was ready.
Later they went down to the kitchen in her coat and his shirt, and cut the bread and ate it with the last of the honey, standing close at the bench with the storm loud on the shutters. The power had gone out, and neither of them had noticed until then, because they hadn’t needed it.
“That’s the whole jar,” he said.
“There’s more where it came from,” she said. “It’s a long storm.”